I owe a lot of the most informative programming work I’ve done to Impact.
Impact was so ahead of its time. Proud to say I was one of the 3000 license owners. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The only game I’ve ever really properly finished was made in Impact.
I loved that the source code was part of the license, and even modified the engine and the editor to suit my needs.
I was so inspired that I worked on my own JS game engine (instead of finishing games - ha!) for years after. I never released it, but I learned a ton in the process and made a lot of fun gamejam games with it.
I was also inspired by Impact’s native iOS support (Ejecta), but frustrated that it didn’t run on Android (at the time at least), so I fumbled my way through writing JVM bindings for V8 and implemented a subset of WebGL to run my game engine on Android without web views.[0] I made the repo for V8 bindings public and to my surprise it ended up being used in commercial software.
I won’t bore you with the startup I tried to bootstrap for selling access to private GitHub repos, which was inspired by Impact’s business model…
Anyway, it warms my heart and makes me laugh with glee to see Impact getting an update for the “modern” web with a C port!
I’d say these are strange times for the web, but I can’t remember a time when things were anything but strange. Cheers!
I might be missing something, but isn't the original Impact a JavaScript & browser based engine, thus it should run on Android in a simple Web view just fine?
Most of that repo appears to have been built in early 2013. Android WebView didn't switch to chromium until late 2013. Prior to that it was usually an older hacked up WebKit sometimes provided by the phone manufacturer with unreliable features.
Ejecta was a project that implemented WebGL with JavaScript bindings -- basically everything you need for a web game without the DOM. It implemented enough of WebGL to run Impact-based games.
> Many Web games were created with Impact [the game engine from the article] and it even served as the basis for some commercial cross-platform titles like Cross Code, Eliot Quest and my own Nintendo Wii-U game XType Plus.
Cross Code is an excellent game. I knew that it used web tech and I was constantly amazed by how performant it was on the Nintendo Switch hardware. I would guess that this engine deserves some credit there!
To be fair, they modified Impact _a lot_. In some of their development streams[1] you can see a heavily extended Weltmeister (Impact's level editor).
Imho, that's fantastic! I love to see devs being able to adapt the engine for their particular game. Likewise, high_impact shouldn't be seen as a “feature-complete” game engine, but rather as a convenient starting point.
That switch port took a lot of effort as someone has already commented, it is absolutely not standard impact.js.
For the anecdote, everyone wanted a Switch version, but considering the technical limitation, the team replied with "Sorry but CrossCode will be coming to Switch when Hedgehags learn to fly." [1] When they finally got to do it [2], it came with an extra quest called "A switch in attitude", featuring, you guessed it, flying hedgehags.
One thing to note, is you don’t have to feel compelled to master every combat mechanic the game throws at you (which is a lot), you can just pick your favorites. A “fox with one trick vs a thousand” and all that.
I for example basically ignore the shield for the vast majority of the game, only doing some very basic usage for some bosses, but perfect counters could very well be your favorite thing.
Huh. Never would have guessed. I am sure there were many “fancy” effects in the game, but during my playthrough, it all felt like it would have been achievable on a SNES.
"Thoughts on Flash" may just have saved the Web platform at its hour of greatest need, ie. creeping dominance of a single piece of software.
I believe that somewhere in there was frustration with Adobe who seemed to abandon the MacOS platform support for Windows' much larger user base, eg. Mac versions were always behind Windows versions. Perhaps Jobs also may've felt that there would be no Adobe without Apple as much as the other way around but that's speculative
Flash had numerous issues. The processing power available (especially on a PSP) is more than enough to be “good”, the problem with flash _performance_ is the power usage while achieving that perf. Even on laptops flash was a significant battery life drain whenever it was running, having it on all websites would kill battery life while browsing on a phone.
... and the post has me poking around with C again. was always an ecmascript guy with a little Lingo in there from long ago, however I have an itch for all things low-resource and close to the metal (but not assembly lang close) and golfing my way towards somethings that encourage me to dig deeper
> My decision to sell it was met with a lot of backlash but was successful enough to launch me into a self-sustained career.
As someone who is interested in eventually freeing myself from the corporate job and diving head-first into my side projects, I would love to hear more about this aspect.
For some reason the idea of trying to charge folks for the work I would normally do for the fun of it on the side is daunting to me, even though I know it could enable me to focus on doing the stuff I love full-time.
It's perfectly reasonable to get compensated for the (good) work that you do if it's solving problems for someone, which you probably already know.
So I think it's important to figure out why the idea of doing that is daunting to you. Some common "reasons" are:
- People you interact with frequently tell you to not to do it.
- Not having all the skills to execute what you want to do well.
- Asking people for help feels embarrassing and/or is annoying to them.
- The fear of having your work judged by others.
- Losing the "safety" that part of, or all of, your current income offers; especially if you have dependents.
For most people (in the context of what you said), those aren't really good reasons—it's just because it's difficult to leave the comfort zone (nothing wrong with that) because that will require at least some degree of readjustment that seem "risky". With that mindset it's actually very difficult to ever find a good time to do what you _want_ to do because all opportunities appear to be risks instead.
On a somewhat related note, I think it's important to just do what you think is fun and show it to the world, but turning that into something that you can make a living with is an entirely different challenge.
Most people don't actually get to do what they love doing for a living; even if you do, having the pressure that is the expectations of paying customers and/or maintaining revenue could take that love away from you. That's absolutely not to say that you shouldn't—it's just something that's good to be aware of before you jump into it.
Had to log in to my rarely-used HN account to mention that I had played Biolab Disaster over and over again years back but lost track of it and forgot the name. Kinda wild to find it again by sheer luck!
> high_impact is not a “library”, but rather a framework. It's an empty scaffold, that you can fill. You write your business logic inside the framework.
I normally phrase this in a much more negative way: a "framework" is simply a "library" that does not place nice with others. It's good to hear a sensible positive phrasing for once.
I studied Software Engineering, but never quite grasped the difference between a Library and a Framework until I started my first job developing with Web Objects.
It is a joy to use such a rich and well thought out Framework that really does do 99% of everything you need. Adding in your own stuff is about the easiest development I've ever done, and it just works. It was magic, and I miss using it.
My ideal framework is a library or set of cooperating libraries on the inside, with as little framework as possible.
e.g. Qt is a framework. Qt "calls you". But you can run the QPainter code without starting the Qt event loop or thinking too hard about QObjects. You should ideally be able to use the event loop without buying into signals and slots, though it won't be as ergonomic.
It's not always possible, it's not always worth it, but everything else being equal, I'd rather have no framework at all.
(For game engines I understand why a little framework is necessary - When you're talking about compiling to a weirdo platform like phones or consoles, the engine must also be involved in your build process and sometimes even libc shit. So you can't just make a Win32 exe that is a PlayStation game.)
Not to mention the part where adding compressors like this somewhat defeats the purpose of using a simple format like QOI (although at least zstd is faster than gzip, let alone 7zip).
But if we're modifying things like that, then they might as well make use of Nigel Tao's improved QOIR format, and replace the LZ4 compressor it uses with zstd. That's probably faster and likely compresses better than QOI.
Readit News
Impact was so ahead of its time. Proud to say I was one of the 3000 license owners. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The only game I’ve ever really properly finished was made in Impact.
I loved that the source code was part of the license, and even modified the engine and the editor to suit my needs.
I was so inspired that I worked on my own JS game engine (instead of finishing games - ha!) for years after. I never released it, but I learned a ton in the process and made a lot of fun gamejam games with it.
I was also inspired by Impact’s native iOS support (Ejecta), but frustrated that it didn’t run on Android (at the time at least), so I fumbled my way through writing JVM bindings for V8 and implemented a subset of WebGL to run my game engine on Android without web views.[0] I made the repo for V8 bindings public and to my surprise it ended up being used in commercial software.
I won’t bore you with the startup I tried to bootstrap for selling access to private GitHub repos, which was inspired by Impact’s business model…
Anyway, it warms my heart and makes me laugh with glee to see Impact getting an update for the “modern” web with a C port!
I’d say these are strange times for the web, but I can’t remember a time when things were anything but strange. Cheers!
[0]: https://github.com/namuol/jv8
Deleted Comment
Cross Code is an excellent game. I knew that it used web tech and I was constantly amazed by how performant it was on the Nintendo Switch hardware. I would guess that this engine deserves some credit there!
Imho, that's fantastic! I love to see devs being able to adapt the engine for their particular game. Likewise, high_impact shouldn't be seen as a “feature-complete” game engine, but rather as a convenient starting point.
[1] https://youtu.be/4lZfnM9Ubeo?t=3215
You can't polish a turd. There would've been no point in modifying the engine a bunch if you hadn't given them a useful base to work with.
For the anecdote, everyone wanted a Switch version, but considering the technical limitation, the team replied with "Sorry but CrossCode will be coming to Switch when Hedgehags learn to fly." [1] When they finally got to do it [2], it came with an extra quest called "A switch in attitude", featuring, you guessed it, flying hedgehags.
[1] https://www.radicalfishgames.com/?p=6581 [2] https://www.radicalfishgames.com/?p=6668
So, if I understand correctly, this is roughly what he did:
1. Wrote a transpiler to convert the subset of Javascript used by CrossCode into a dialect of Haxe.
2. Selectively modified his version of Haxe in small ways to more closely match the semantics of Javascript, to make writing the transpiler easier.
3. Selectively re-wrote complicated parts of the Javascript code into Haxe directly, so that his transpiler didn't have to handle them.
4. Transpiled <canvas> and other browser API calls into calls to his own pre-existing Kha framework for Haxe, which provided similar APIs.
5. Compiled the Haxe output into C++.
6. Compiled the C++ to native code.
Damn.
I for example basically ignore the shield for the vast majority of the game, only doing some very basic usage for some bosses, but perfect counters could very well be your favorite thing.
I believe that somewhere in there was frustration with Adobe who seemed to abandon the MacOS platform support for Windows' much larger user base, eg. Mac versions were always behind Windows versions. Perhaps Jobs also may've felt that there would be no Adobe without Apple as much as the other way around but that's speculative
The game looks slick af btw,
As someone who is interested in eventually freeing myself from the corporate job and diving head-first into my side projects, I would love to hear more about this aspect.
For some reason the idea of trying to charge folks for the work I would normally do for the fun of it on the side is daunting to me, even though I know it could enable me to focus on doing the stuff I love full-time.
So I think it's important to figure out why the idea of doing that is daunting to you. Some common "reasons" are:
- People you interact with frequently tell you to not to do it.
- Not having all the skills to execute what you want to do well.
- Asking people for help feels embarrassing and/or is annoying to them.
- The fear of having your work judged by others.
- Losing the "safety" that part of, or all of, your current income offers; especially if you have dependents.
For most people (in the context of what you said), those aren't really good reasons—it's just because it's difficult to leave the comfort zone (nothing wrong with that) because that will require at least some degree of readjustment that seem "risky". With that mindset it's actually very difficult to ever find a good time to do what you _want_ to do because all opportunities appear to be risks instead.
On a somewhat related note, I think it's important to just do what you think is fun and show it to the world, but turning that into something that you can make a living with is an entirely different challenge.
Most people don't actually get to do what they love doing for a living; even if you do, having the pressure that is the expectations of paying customers and/or maintaining revenue could take that love away from you. That's absolutely not to say that you shouldn't—it's just something that's good to be aware of before you jump into it.
I normally phrase this in a much more negative way: a "framework" is simply a "library" that does not place nice with others. It's good to hear a sensible positive phrasing for once.
It is a joy to use such a rich and well thought out Framework that really does do 99% of everything you need. Adding in your own stuff is about the easiest development I've ever done, and it just works. It was magic, and I miss using it.
My ideal framework is a library or set of cooperating libraries on the inside, with as little framework as possible.
e.g. Qt is a framework. Qt "calls you". But you can run the QPainter code without starting the Qt event loop or thinking too hard about QObjects. You should ideally be able to use the event loop without buying into signals and slots, though it won't be as ergonomic.
It's not always possible, it's not always worth it, but everything else being equal, I'd rather have no framework at all.
(For game engines I understand why a little framework is necessary - When you're talking about compiling to a weirdo platform like phones or consoles, the engine must also be involved in your build process and sometimes even libc shit. So you can't just make a Win32 exe that is a PlayStation game.)
But if we're modifying things like that, then they might as well make use of Nigel Tao's improved QOIR format, and replace the LZ4 compressor it uses with zstd. That's probably faster and likely compresses better than QOI.
[0] https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2022/qoir.html
[1] https://github.com/nigeltao/qoir
Out of respect for your player's battery life, perhaps :)